Books of The Times; Damning a President With Fairness

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President Reagan The Role of a Lifetime By Lou Cannon 948 pages. Illustrated. Simon & Schuster. $24.95.

By being eminently fair, Lou Cannon has written a devastating account of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. Try as he does to be even-handed, and he is so almost to a fault, the conclusion of "President Reagan" is best summed up in the apt subtitle of his book: "The Role of a Lifetime."

It's a phrase that can be interpreted without rancor by Mr. Reagan and his admirers; of course being President of the United States is the most important event in anyone's life, ex-actor or ex-anything else. But by the end of this exhaustive 948-page Presidential biography, Mr. Cannon leaves the reader with a decidedly negative assessment: that while Mr. Reagan may have been qualified to play the part of a President in Hollywood, he was unqualified to be the President in Washington.

The author, now the Western correspondent for The Washington Post, covered Ronald Reagan for more than 25 years in California and Washington and interviewed him and Nancy Reagan several times for this book. He delivers his judgment in temperate language:

"Because of his ability to reflect and give voice to the aspirations of his fellow citizens, Reagan succeeded in reviving national confidence at a time when there was a great need for inspiration. This was his great contribution as President. But because he believed in happy endings obtained with too little sacrifice, this revived confidence became an end in itself that Reagan rarely sought to focus on higher goals. He aged little in the Presidency and took his role too lightly. In the end, it proved too big for his talents."

Mr. Cannon's book is a very solid piece of work. While it touches upon Mr. Reagan's life, its main focus is on his performance in office. He gives Mr. Reagan good marks for the intangibles -- inspiring confidence in the American system, showing friendship and leadership in his foreign dealings, being what his critics called a "Dr. Feelgood," a calumny that Mr. Reagan took as a compliment.

But on the tangibles, Mr. Reagan comes off in the book as a sincere incompetent, who sometimes actually snoozed on the job and whose vision for Americans followed the starry-eyed scenarios of old movies. The author says Mr. Reagan often exaggerated for the sake of a story, confusing real life with reel life. As others have written, Mr. Reagan told world leaders that he had seen the concentration camps in Europe when, in fact, he did so only on film in Hollywood, where he spent the war years.

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One of the highlights of the author's analytical reporting is that he looks closely at the numbers during Mr. Reagan's two terms; in the best tradition of investigative journalism, he follows the money. Measuring the scripted campaign rhetoric against the Federal Government's bottom line, he shows that while Mr. Reagan promised to balance the budget, his policies led to the largest national debt and worst foreign trade deficit in American history. In this respect, the author quotes a pungent comment about the legacy of Mr. Reagan and Reaganomics by Walt Rostow, a special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson and a history professor at the University of Texas: "He's been a good-time Charlie. Nothing bad's going to happen on my watch."

Mr. Cannon properly devotes two powerful chapters -- which he calls "Darkness at Noon" and "Struggle at Twilight" -- to the Iran-contra affair. It was the nadir of Mr. Reagan's style of governance, when a military and intelligence sub-government illegally defied Congress and secretly ran the nation's foreign policy. How much did the President know and when did he know about the diversion of Iran arms-sales proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras? Mr. Cannon is no potted palm when he questions the President's convenient forgetfulness. He writes:

"Reagan has consistently denied knowledge of the diversion -- a denial he repeated to me for this book and in his memoirs. But such denials can hardly be regarded as conclusive, even by those who believe Reagan is telling the truth as he remembers it. As has often been observed in these pages, Reagan long ago learned to accept as the truth whatever version of events he used to explain things."

The author doesn't always slam-dunk his points. For example, he uses such euphemisms as "ethical insensitivity," "ethical embarrassments" and "ethical impropriety" for the plain corruption of some of Mr. Reagan's closest aides and Cabinet members, including those at the head of the Justice, Labor, Interior and the Housing and Urban Development departments. Yet he does score with unsensational outside shots at the Presidency when he gets down to the specifics of such things as the courts, the environment and the regulatory agencies. "Overall," he says, "Reagan left a ruinous regulatory legacy."

"President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime" is the second book by a Washington Post writer to appear in the last few weeks in which the former President is found not to have been up to the job. In "Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years" ( W. W. Norton ), Haynes Johnson concludes that the country is now paying for the Reagan legacy with lowered ideals and a debtor economy. Both books are on the same wavelength, with Mr. Johnson's taking a broader look at the social history of the nation and Mr. Cannon's concentrating more on the Reagan Presidency itself. It's noteworthy that Simon & Schuster is the publisher not only of Mr. Cannon's serious book about the President but also of Kitty Kelley's scandal-filled book about the First Lady.

Inevitably, Mr. Cannon also mentions the opulence of the White House under the regal Reagans. But the main value of his well-documented Presidential biography is his evidence that Mr. Reagan's Oval Office too often was out to lunch.

A version of this review appears in print on April 24, 1991, on Page C00016 of the National edition with the headline: Books of The Times; Damning a President With Fairness. Today's Paper|Subscribe